Online social networking is a popular means of connecting people who share similar interests, industrial skills, academic background and the like. Online social networking provides users the opportunity to interact with other users without being restricted by geographic and time-zone boundaries. Further, users are able to customize their profiles by becoming part of groups and communities within the social networking service and communicate with each other using e-mail, instant messages, forums and the like, provided by the social networking service.
Users register with online social networking services and fill out web forms to provide information such as their name, gender, email address, area of residence, interests and hobbies, work experience, educational background, photographs and so forth. Once registered, the users may then form their own social network and customize their profiles by establishing relationships with other users, joining communities, posting content and posting their views and comments on posted content.
However, filling personal details in web forms during registration is a cumbersome activity. With a multitude of social networking services, providing personal details while registering for each of the social networking services also proves to be repetitive and cumbersome. This problem is compounded by the limited importability of information from one online social networking service to another.
Further, the task of building one's social network is a slow and time consuming process that requires inputs and efforts from the user. Moreover to build one's social network involves identifying potential contacts, communicating with the potential contacts, forming relationships with the potential contacts, identifying communities of interest and joining these communities. Also, due to limited importability of information from one social networking service to another, forming relationships with users already related on other social networking sites is a repetitive and laborious task.
Still further, online social networking services do not provide convenient methods to entities searching for and contacting people who are potential candidates for purposes such as volunteering at events, creating a subject set for researches and studies, forming focus groups, targeting relevant users for advertisements and so forth. Also, there is no mechanism to target groups of people rather than individuals for the above mentioned purposes. Current online social networking services require such entities to manually search, screen and contact the individual members of the social network.